Everybody Has Everything

“I’m not sure what to do now,” she said.

“Why don’t you get his bed ready while I give him the bath?”

Ana nodded, and James turned to the boy, lifting him gently into the tub. “Let’s get clean, right? Let’s get clean.” James wiped the washcloth with Ana’s French milled soap, then rubbed it up and down his back.

“Where toys?” asked Fi

James looked around the bathroom. Stainless steel soap pump. A small vase with a white daisy in it. The uselessness of the room struck him: Two years ago, they had knocked out walls and installed a sitting area in the bathroom. It contained a large black cane chair and a table holding magazines that had never been touched. James sat in the chair only once, the day it arrived, declaring it not uncomfortable.

Under the sink, James discovered an old blue plastic water cup—something of his from a long-ago apartment. With the cup, Fi

He said to Fi

Ana returned with a green fluffy towel that she sniffed before handing it over—verbena. James lifted Fi

But then Fi

James wrapped him in the towel.

“I’m a burrito!” cried Fi

James scooped him up, carried him to the guest room. Ana had made up the bed with honey-colored linens. It isn’t a child’s room, thought James, dropping the towel on the leather love seat. There was no whimsy anywhere in the house. They didn’t speak of this guest room as a future nursery anymore, though a nursery with a view of the garden had been a selling point, hadn’t it? He was sure it had.

“Help me,” said Ana. James looked at her and realized she meant the bed. Together, they moved it to the wall.

“Watch TV!” cried Fi

“No TV. We’ll do a book,” said James, then looked at Ana, who hovered again in the doorframe. “Wait, do we have any books?”

“We left the bus book in the car,” said Ana, watching James expertly stick the diaper, pull on the monster pants.

About the absence of books, James said: “Shit.”

Fi

Ana, roused to James’s defense, said: “You said it, too.”

“I know. You’re right. It’s a bad word,” said James. He turned to Ana: “Can you see if there’s anything for him to read? Maybe a graphic novel or something.”

“I don’t know if Robert Crumb is appropriate,” said Ana, but she headed toward their bedroom and the basket of magazines next to her bedside table.

Fi

“Maybe the cartoons in here?” Ana asked, returning with an old New Yorker that Sarah had lent her months ago. James laughed. Ana sat down on the bed next to James, as if she, too, was awaiting story time. He flipped through the magazine, James asking Fi

Ana placed throw cushions on the floor at the side of the bed, a circumference, like a ring of lye outside a village hut used to keep away the witches. James leaned down, and small hands circled his neck. Ana patted Fi

“Sing light,” said Fi

“Leave the light on?” asked James.

“No! Sing it! Sing it!”

Ana raised a single finger to her temple and began to rub, as if it would help her to draw understanding out of her skull.

“Light? A song about light?” she said, feeling like she had walked into a game of charades.

“Yes! Sing it!”

“Can you sing it, Fi

“No, Mama sing it,” he said. James and Ana went still, wondering what would happen next. Fi

James said, “I’m sorry, Fi

Fi

“Okay.”

James sang it again, and Ana looked away. But James wasn’t self-conscious, almost never was he self-conscious, and especially not now, having seen how his song rescued the boy from the edge, pulled him back from the churning waters of sadness. He smiled again, laughed even as James sang the last line: “ ‘They come back to rock ‘n’ roll.’ ”

“Good night,” said Ana, leaving James to do the final kiss and tuck. She found herself in the hallway, with her hand on the wall, closing her eyes.

“Good night,” she heard her husband say.

James was in bed first, looking from his laptop to Ana as she moved through the room in her long white nightgown. She straightened an angled jewelry box, then carefully hooked her belt on a belt rack, her blazer in the section of the closet reserved for blazers.

“I didn’t put my shoes away,” he said, as she picked up his sneakers from the middle of the floor and placed them, toes out, in the closet.

“How about: Sorry, I didn’t put my shoes away.” She moved like a machete hacking the reeds, clearing, clearing, clearing.

“Okay, sorry,” said James, just a touch of sarcasm. “It says here the ideal bedtime for a two-year-old is seven p.m.”

“Mmm,” said Ana.

“It also says we should get baby soap. He could get eczema.”

Ana was lost in her movements, saying nothing. James used to joke about the tidying. When they left her apartment to go out, James would help, putting the clean dishes in the cupboards and emptying the food trap in the sink. Then he’d stand at the door waiting and a